Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Attorney-General (Senator Brandis) to a question without notice asked by Senator McKim today relating to the asylum seeker policy.

Despite being given numerous opportunities today by the Greens to reject the $9.6 billion calculated by Save the Children and UNICEF as the cost of Australia's cruel, inhumane, illegal—in the context of our international human rights obligations—and ineffective asylum seeker policies, the Attorney-General not only failed to reject that costing but failed to offer any alternative figure on behalf of the government and failed to commit the government to conducting a process whereby, with transparent methodology, it calculates and releases its own costing.

As I said to the Attorney in my question, it is entirely reasonable now for Australians to conclude that the $9.6 billion calculated by UNICEF and Save the Children is an accurate costing. Let's think about that for a minute: $9.6 billion since 2013, when so-called Operation Sovereign Borders began, equates to about $3.2 billion a year. What have Australian taxpayers got for the $3.2 billion a year that the government has expended—using other people's money, I might add; using the money of Australian taxpayers—on their behalf and in their name?

What they have got is camps set up on Manus Island, in Papua New Guinea, and in Nauru, camps that are designed to deliberately harm some of our fellow human beings, whose only mistake—in fact, I withdraw 'mistake'. Their only so-called crime—and it is not a crime to seek asylum; it was a decision that they made—was to seek asylum in Australia. For that, they have been indefinitely detained on Manus Island and on Nauru, in conditions that have been deliberately designed to be punitive and to cause, at the very least, psychological harm, and in the full knowledge that physical harm is overwhelmingly likely to follow. That is one thing that the Australian people have got for that expenditure.

They have also got a situation where their country is in flagrant breach of its international human rights obligations. I do not have time to go into all of the human rights instruments that Australia is a signatory to that we are in breach of, but there are many. The Australian government has established what the Papua New Guinea Supreme Court has determined is an illegal detention centre on Manus Island. We also now know, through the release of the Nauru files, of the over 2,000 assaults, including sexual assaults, of men, women and children that are alleged to have occurred on Nauru that the Australian government has not responded adequately to.

When we asked about these matters today, what we got in the main from the Attorney-General was a justification on the basis that, in his words, the boats have stopped. This is the big, fat misinformation that the Attorney and others on the government benches continue to perpetrate around their asylum seeker policies. On the government's own figures, 30 boats have been turned back since Operation Sovereign Borders started in 2013. And they are only the boats that the government has confessed to, that we know of. There may have been many, many more but, because of the veil of secrecy the government has dropped over what is going on in international waters—potentially in Australian waters—we simply do not know. But we do know that they have confessed to 30. As Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has said in a media release within the last fortnight, the people smugglers—in his words—are still targeting Australia. So the boats are still departing and people are still putting their lives at risk at sea—and, remember, that was the justification that was used to establish Australia's offshore detention policy. It is an epic failure of a policy, it has not achieved what it set out to achieve and it is costing us $3.2 billion a year. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.